tea.mathoverflow.net - Discussion Feed ("Terminology" and "names" tags)

jc comments on ""Terminology" and "names" tags" (5623)

jc — Thu, 20 May 2010 08:23:15 -0700

I just noticed this now. As of now, 28 questions have been tagged with "terminology" and 30 questions have been tagged with "names", and I can't tell the difference between tag usage for most of the questions. (Or at least I've been tagging with just "names" without knowing about "terminology")

Jonas Meyer comments on ""Terminology" and "names" tags" (3579)

Jonas Meyer — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 18:01:23 -0800

Ryan, that's a good point which I overlooked. I agree that names of conjectures (or theorems, etc.) don't seem to fall under terminology.

Ryan Budney comments on ""Terminology" and "names" tags" (3578)

Ryan Budney — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 17:21:09 -0800

Here's a "names" tagged thread that isn't the name of a mathematician but maybe shouldn't be called terminology?

I don't know, maybe it should be tagged terminology. It somehow seems less formal than terminology.

http://mathoverflow.net/questions/7089/a-problem-conjecture-related-to-4-manifolds-that-deserves-a-name-what-name-does

Jonas Meyer comments on ""Terminology" and "names" tags" (3577)

Jonas Meyer — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 16:02:37 -0800

I guess the "names" tag was initially created for a question about terminology. Then it was used for a couple of questions regarding the names of mathematicians, but since then it has gone back to being used exclusively for terminology.

The newly created "terminology" tag makes me wonder if we should start making a distinction. "Terminology" is probably a better description than "names" in most cases; people would probably be more likely to search for this if they needed to use the tag, and a person browsing questions would know immediately what the tag means as opposed to the ambiguous "names".

Should we change most of the "names" tags to "terminology", with the exception of those rare cases of questions about someone's name? (In terms of implementing, if people think this is a good idea, it might be best to just merge names-->terminology and then manually edit the couple of exceptions.)